Reader’s Note: This article is adapted from themes explored in my upcoming devotional, Spiritual Resilience: Growing in God’s Grace — A 14-Day Devotional Journey Through 2 Peter, scheduled for publication in November 2026. While this post reflects the biblical themes, recovery principles, and spiritual direction of the devotional, it has been intentionally developed as a separate public-facing reflection so as not to reproduce the unpublished manuscript in full. My hope is that these thoughts will encourage you to remain rooted in Jesus Christ when answers seem delayed, healing unfolds more slowly than expected, and faith requires us to keep walking before we can clearly see where the road is leading.
Some of you may remember what became known as the Marshmallow Experiment. A child was brought into a room, seated in front of a marshmallow, and given a choice. They could eat the marshmallow now, or they could wait—and if they waited long enough, they would receive another one.
Think about what that asks of a child. The marshmallow is right there. They can see it. They can smell it. They know exactly what they could have right now. But the second marshmallow exists only as a promise. Someone has told them that if they wait, something more is coming.
Now, years ago, this experiment became famous because early follow-up research appeared to connect the ability to delay gratification with better outcomes later in life. Later research showed us that the story is considerably more complicated than that. Family environment, socioeconomic circumstances, cognitive development, and other factors matter too. So the lesson is not that whether you ate a marshmallow at four years old determines the rest of your life.
But the experiment still gives us a fascinating picture of what it feels like to wait for something that has been promised when something immediate is sitting right in front of us.
And fellow travelers, that is where I want us to begin this morning.
Because sometimes faith feels remarkably similar.
God has spoken. God has promised. We know what Scripture says. We remember what He has already done. Yet what we can see right now does not seem to match what we were expecting.
Healing is taking longer than we wanted. Recovery feels slower than we imagined. The prayer has not been answered the way we hoped. The relationship has not changed. Grief remains. The temptation we thought should have disappeared still occasionally knocks on the door.
And somewhere in that waiting we begin asking a question remarkably similar to the question Peter records in 2 Peter 3:4:
“Where is the promise?”
Peter's answer is not, Try harder to convince yourself that nothing hurts. His answer is not, Pretend the waiting is easy. Peter brings us back to the character of God:
“The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward.” — 2 Peter 3:9
What we interpret as delay may not be abandonment at all.
And this morning, I want to talk about what happens between the promise and the fulfillment—because sometimes that space we desperately want God to shorten is the very place where He is teaching us how to develop steadfast faith.
There are seasons when waiting on God becomes one of the most difficult expressions of faith. We pray, surrender, make healthier decisions, establish boundaries, seek counsel, remain sober, open our Scriptures, show up for church and recovery meetings, and continue doing what we know to be faithful. Yet the situation we hoped would change remains unresolved. Healing moves more slowly than expected. Grief remains tender. An old fear resurfaces. A prayer seems unanswered. Somewhere within that waiting, an uncomfortable question begins taking shape: If God is really working, why is this taking so long?
That question does not necessarily mean our faith has disappeared. Sometimes it simply means we are discovering how difficult it is to trust God when His timetable does not resemble ours. We may intellectually believe that God is faithful while emotionally struggling with what feels like His silence. We know what Scripture says, remember what He has already brought us through, and still wonder why the next chapter has not unfolded.
Second Peter speaks directly into that tension. As Peter approaches the conclusion of his final epistle, he addresses believers who were hearing another question: “Where is the promise of his coming?” (2 Peter 3:4). Enough time had passed that scoffers interpreted waiting as evidence that nothing was going to happen. Peter responds by teaching something essential for every Christian learning to wait upon God: what appears to us as delay is not evidence that God has forgotten His promise.
“The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward.” — 2 Peter 3:9
For those of us walking through recovery, spiritual formation, grief, restoration, or any extended season of uncertainty, that distinction matters tremendously.
When Waiting Starts to Feel Like Abandonment
Waiting has a way of exposing what we believe about God.
When circumstances move according to our expectations, trusting God may seem relatively straightforward. We pray, something changes, and we recognize His provision. The difficulty comes when we pray and nothing seems to move. Days become weeks, weeks become months, and sometimes months become years. That is when we become vulnerable to interpreting our circumstances as commentary on God’s character.
Peter refuses to allow that conclusion.
In 2 Peter 3:8–9, he reminds his readers that God is not governed by our experience of time. Peter is not offering a mathematical formula for predicting prophetic events. He is correcting the assumption that human impatience determines divine faithfulness. What we call slow is not necessarily slow from the perspective of the God who sees the beginning, the middle, and the end.
More importantly, Peter replaces the language of delay with the language of patience. God is not carelessly postponing what He promised. His longsuffering creates room for repentance, mercy, preparation, and transformation.
That truth changes how we understand seasons when nothing appears to be happening.
God’s Patience Is Not God’s Inactivity
One of the greatest spiritual dangers of prolonged waiting is assuming that because we cannot see movement, there must not be movement.
Scripture repeatedly challenges that assumption. James writes that the testing of our faith produces patience and endurance, and that endurance must be allowed to complete its work so that spiritual maturity develops (James 1:2–4). Paul follows a similar progression in Romans 5:3–5, teaching that tribulation produces perseverance, perseverance develops character, and character strengthens hope.
Neither passage romanticizes suffering. Pain is still painful. Uncertainty is still uncomfortable. Waiting can still exhaust us.
Yet Scripture gives us another possibility to consider: perhaps the season we desperately want to escape is also a season in which God is developing something within us that could not be produced through instant relief.
Sometimes the prayer we keep asking is, “God, when are You going to change this?”
The deeper question may eventually become, “Father, what are You forming within me while I am here?”
That is a considerably different way of understanding waiting.
Recovery Teaches Us to Respect the Pace of Transformation
Anyone who has spent meaningful time in recovery eventually discovers something uncomfortable: recovery is not transactional.
We may enter recovery carrying patterns that developed over years or decades while quietly hoping they will disappear within weeks. We stop drinking, using, acting out, controlling, rescuing, people-pleasing, or repeatedly returning to destructive relationships, and then become frustrated when our internal world does not immediately follow our external decisions.
The substance may be gone while distorted thinking remains. The unhealthy relationship may have ended while grief and attachment remain. We may have received forgiveness while shame still occasionally visits. A healthy boundary may be completely appropriate while guilt continues telling us that we have done something wrong.
None of those experiences automatically mean recovery has failed.
They often mean transformation is still taking place.
One of the more important lessons we can learn is to respect the pace of transformation without becoming passive about our growth. There is an important difference between patience and complacency. Biblical patience continues walking with God while His work unfolds. It remains honest, teachable, accountable, and willing to change.
Paul expresses tremendous confidence in this process when he writes:
“He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.” — Philippians 1:6
The work may still be unfinished, but unfinished does not mean abandoned.
Deliverance and Transformation Are Not Always the Same Moment
The story of Israel provides a powerful picture of this reality. God brought Israel out of Egypt through a dramatic act of deliverance, but learning to live as a covenant people required years of formation in the wilderness.
Their geography changed before all of their desires changed.
Egypt was behind them, yet when hunger, uncertainty, and discomfort arrived, some began remembering Egypt as though bondage had somehow been safer than freedom (Exodus 16:2–3; Numbers 11:4–6).
Recovery often contains a similar tension.
God may bring us out of something before every pattern associated with that former life has come out of us. We may be physically removed from the substance, relationship, environment, behavior, or crisis while still carrying coping mechanisms and thought patterns developed there.
This helps us understand why an old thought resurfacing does not necessarily mean we have returned to our old life. Feeling temptation does not mean surrender was meaningless. Experiencing grief does not prove healing has failed. Recognizing an unhealthy response does not erase our progress.
Sometimes being able to recognize something that once controlled us unconsciously is itself evidence of growth.
That recognition gives us an opportunity to make a different decision.
Christ Calls Us Into a New Way of Living
Christian recovery therefore involves considerably more than simply stopping destructive behavior. We are learning how to live differently because Christ is forming something different within us.
Paul describes this new identity in Galatians 2:20:
“I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”
Jesus describes the same movement when He calls His disciples to deny themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow Him (Luke 9:23).
This is why spiritual transformation frequently feels unfamiliar. Dysfunction may have been destructive, but it was familiar. Chaos may have hurt us, but we learned how to survive within it. We developed responses that helped us navigate conflict, rejection, fear, instability, disappointment, or emotional pain.
Then Jesus calls us toward another way.
Instead of retaliation, we learn restraint. Instead of isolation, we learn healthy community. Instead of manipulation, we practice honesty. Instead of controlling another person, we establish boundaries around our own behavior. Instead of numbing pain, we bring our pain into the presence of God and trustworthy people.
At first, those healthier responses may feel unnatural precisely because they are new.
Transformation takes practice.
Surrendering Our Timetable to God
One of the most challenging parts of surrender is discovering that we frequently want to surrender the circumstance while keeping control over the outcome.
We surrender the relationship but expect reconciliation. We surrender grief but want the pain removed immediately. We surrender our recovery but expect every temptation to disappear. We surrender our future but still want God to explain exactly what tomorrow will bring.
Biblical surrender eventually confronts our timetable.
Proverbs 3:5–6 tells us to trust in the Lord with all our heart and not lean entirely upon our own understanding. That passage is familiar enough that we may overlook how demanding it actually is. Trust becomes necessary precisely because there are things we do not understand.
We may not know when healing will become easier. We may not know whether another person will change. We may not know whether reconciliation will happen. We may not understand why one prayer appears to receive an immediate answer while another remains unresolved.
Faith does not always give us those explanations.
Faith gives us Someone trustworthy when the explanation remains hidden.
One Day at a Time Is More Than a Recovery Slogan
Jesus offers remarkably practical wisdom about the future in Matthew 6:34 when He tells His disciples not to become consumed with tomorrow because today already contains sufficient concerns of its own.
That does not mean Christians should never plan. Wisdom plans, prepares, establishes goals, considers consequences, and accepts appropriate responsibility for the future. Jesus is confronting something different: the exhausting tendency to emotionally live inside a tomorrow that God has not yet given us.
Recovery describes this with familiar language: one day at a time.
There is profound biblical wisdom within that principle.
Yesterday can teach us, but we cannot live there. Tomorrow deserves preparation, but we cannot control it. Today is where obedience actually happens.
What does faithfulness require today?
Perhaps it means attending the meeting. Perhaps it means making the telephone call we have been avoiding, keeping a counseling appointment, maintaining a necessary boundary, opening Scripture when our thinking becomes distorted, making an apology, completing an honest inventory, asking someone trustworthy for help, or refusing to act upon an impulse that promises immediate relief but leads toward bondage.
We do not have to solve the entire road ahead today.
We are responsible for the faithful step presently in front of us.
What Steadfast Faith Actually Looks Like
The expression steadfast faith can sound as though Christians are supposed to become emotionally untouched by difficulty. Scripture paints a considerably more realistic picture.
Isaiah says those who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength (Isaiah 40:31). Hebrews tells believers not to cast away their confidence because they have need of endurance (Hebrews 10:35–36). Paul calls believers to remain steadfast and immovable (1 Corinthians 15:58) and describes Christians as rooted and established in Christ (Colossians 2:6–7).
Notice the imagery.
A rooted tree still experiences wind.
A solid house still experiences storms.
A steadfast Christian can still experience grief, disappointment, exhaustion, rejection, anxiety, temptation, fear, and uncertainty.
Spiritual resilience does not mean nothing ever shakes us. It means the things shaking us no longer possess unquestioned authority over our identity or direction.
Criticism can hurt without defining us. Rejection can grieve us without determining our worth. Anxiety can speak loudly without receiving the final word. Temptation can return without becoming inevitable surrender. A difficult day can require additional support without erasing years of meaningful growth.
Sometimes steadfast faith is simply choosing not to abandon what God has been rebuilding within us because today happens to be difficult.
Who Are You Becoming While You Wait?
Peter eventually shifts the conversation from when something will happen toward the kind of people believers ought to become.
After addressing the coming Day of the Lord, he asks in 2 Peter 3:11 what manner of people they ought to be in holy conduct and godliness.
That question reaches far beyond prophetic expectation.
It reaches directly into discipleship.
We naturally ask, When will this change? When will this become easier? When will the prayer be answered? When will this grief become lighter? When will someone finally understand?
Peter invites another question:
Who am I becoming while I wait?
Am I becoming more honest? More patient? More humble? More compassionate? More discerning? Am I becoming increasingly willing to ask for help? Am I learning to establish healthier boundaries? Am I becoming less controlled by resentment, fear, appetite, shame, or the opinions of other people? Am I becoming more dependent upon Jesus Christ?
Waiting becomes spiritually formative when our attention begins moving from controlling the outcome toward remaining faithful within the process.
You Cannot Control the Wind, but You Can Set the Sail
There is an important difference between biblical hope and what people in recovery sometimes call future tripping.
Hope looks toward tomorrow while remaining anchored in God today. Future tripping mentally travels into events that have not happened, creates threatening outcomes, and then causes us to emotionally experience circumstances that may never occur.
We can spend hours reacting to conversations that have never taken place. We can become angry about something another person might eventually say. We can lose sleep over imagined outcomes and turn one difficult moment into an entire future in which everything falls apart.
Jesus asks in Matthew 6:27 whether anxiety can actually add anything meaningful to our lives. Anxiety often creates tremendous mental activity while producing very little useful movement.
We cannot control every wind coming toward us.
People may misunderstand us. Plans may change. Relationships may end. Doors may close. Grief may return unexpectedly. Temptation may revisit familiar ground. People may continue judging us according to who we used to be rather than recognizing who God is helping us become.
We cannot command every wind to cooperate.
But by the grace of God, we can continue setting the sail.
We can return to Scripture. We can ask for support. We can maintain the boundary. We can refuse the invitation back into bondage. We can challenge distorted thinking. We can surrender resentment. We can remain in fellowship rather than retreat into isolation.
And we can continue moving toward Jesus Christ.
The Promise Has Not Failed
Peter’s message in 2 Peter 3 reminds us that apparent delay is not the same thing as divine absence. God’s patience is not indifference, and our inability to see movement does not mean He has stopped working.
That truth matters when recovery feels slow.
It matters when grief has lasted longer than expected.
It matters when we are still working through patterns we thought should have disappeared years ago.
It matters when prayer seems unanswered and when tomorrow remains uncertain.
God does not ask us to understand every chapter before we trust Him with the story. He calls us to remain faithful with what has been placed within our stewardship today.
So continue walking. Continue praying. Continue opening Scripture. Continue making healthy decisions. Continue reaching toward trustworthy community. Continue surrendering the things you cannot control and taking responsibility for what God has actually placed within your hands.
Do not allow today’s difficulty to erase yesterday’s evidence of grace.
Do not despise slow growth simply because transformation remains unfinished.
And do not mistake waiting for abandonment.
The God who began His work within you remains faithful. One day at a time, one surrendered decision at a time, and one act of obedience at a time, we continue learning that waiting upon the Lord is not necessarily the absence of movement.
Sometimes it is where some of His deepest work is taking place.
The promise has not failed. Christ remains faithful. Keep pressing forward with steadfast faith in Jesus Christ.
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